Seeing the Unseen

For over 60 years, the ultra high-speed photography of Harold E. 'Doc' Edgerton has stopped time. His work makes visible the elusive gestures and trajectories of our world in action: from the dripping of water to a bullet's path. His experiments with stroboscopic flashes resulted in hundreds of --and not incidentally beautiful--images of a realm beyond human vision. Edgerton, a lifelong teacher and researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is today celebrated as both a scientific innovator, and also as an astonishing photographer.

Seeing the Unseen is an engaging new study of Edgertons's life and science. Designed to look like one of Doc's own laboratory notebooks, the book places his work in its historical technological context, and clarifies his motivations and methods. Edgerton, with his own plain-spoken and witty brand of genius, is vividly portrayed in a biographical essay by Douglas Collins. It covers Edgerton's early years in Nebraska, his beginnings at MIT as a graduate student in electrical engineering in 1926, the decades of inspired research and teaching in'Strobe Alley' (his MIT lab), and his fruitful collaborations with everyone from Hollywood filmmakers to Jacques Cousteau, until his death in 1990. Seeing the Unseen is profusely and colorfully illustrated with photographs of and by Harold Edgerton, and well as easily-understood technical diagrams of his methods. Included in the book is a Portfolio Photo CD, produced by George Eastman House and curator James Sheldon, which contains a gallery of 150 of Edgerton's most striking images, and is compatible with any CD-ROM player.

Seeing the Unseen: Dr. Harold E. Edgerton and the Wonders of Strobe Alley is the official catalog for an exhibition of the same name currrently on display at George Eastman House in Rochester, and traveling to Winston-Salem NC, Seattle, Boston, Middlebury VT, and San Diego through 1997.

Distributed for George Eastman House

Review text:

'Microscopic animals, whirring machine parts, deep sea life, atomic blasts,speeding bullets, the wings of a hummingbird--a near universal list of reality in motion as apprehended by the unique problem-solving and powerfully focused curiosity of Dr. Edgerton.'

--James L. Enyeart in his introduction to Seeing the Unseen